The Sign of the Four
By Arthur Conan Doyle
“Oh, didn’t you know?” he cried, laughing. “Yes, I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all on technical subjects. Here, for example, is one ‘Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccoes.’ In it, I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar-, cigarette-, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash. It is a point continually turning up in criminal trials and which is sometimes of supreme importance as a clue. If you can say, for example, that some murder has been done by a man who was smoking an Indian lunch, it narrows your field of search. To the trained eye, there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s-eye as between a cabbage and a potato.”
“You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae,” I remarked.
“I appreciate their importance. Here is my monograph on the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks on the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses. Here, too, is a curious little work on the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork cutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond polishers. That is a matter of great practical interest to the scientific detective—especially in cases of unclaimed bodies or in discovering the antecedents of criminals. But I weary you with my hobby.”
Genre: Fiction And Literature | Mystery/Detective
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Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ, DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician.
Biography.
He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to Holmes’s stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, and plays, romances, poetry, nonfiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle’s early short stories, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (1884), helped popularise the mystery of Mary Celeste.
Early life
Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was born in England and is of Irish Catholic descent, and his mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents married in 1855. In 1864, the family scattered because of Charles’s growing alcoholism, and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. Arthur lodged with Mary Burton, a friend’s aunt, at Liberton Bank House on Gilmerton Road while studying at Newington Academy.
1867, the family reunited and lived in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place. Doyle’s father died in 1893 in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness. Beginning at an early age, Doyle wrote letters to his mother throughout his life, and many of them were preserved.
Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to England to the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire, at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went on to Stonyhurst College, which he attended until 1875. While Doyle was not unhappy at Stonyhurst, he said he had no fond memories of it because the school was run on medieval principles: the subjects covered were rudiments, rhetoric, Euclidean geometry, algebra, and the classics. Doyle later commented that this academic system could only be excused “on the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a mental dumbbell by which one can improve one’s mind”. He also found the school harsh, noting that, instead of compassion and warmth, it favoured the threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation.
From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. His family decided that he would spend a year there to perfect his German and broaden his academic horizons. He later rejected the Catholic faith and became an agnostic. One source attributed his drift from religion to his time in the less strict Austrian school. He also later became a spiritualist mystic.
Literary career
Sherlock Holmes
Doyle struggled to find a publisher. His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, which gave Doyle £25 (equivalent to £2,900 in 2019) in exchange for all rights to the story. The piece appeared a year later in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.
Holmes was partially modelled on Doyle’s former university teacher, Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes … round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man”, and in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, “It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.” Robert Louis Stevenson recognised the substantial similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: “My compliments on your ingenious and exciting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. … can this be my old friend Joe Bell?” Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences—for instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin, mentioned disparagingly by Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname to a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle’s, Dr. James Watson, but not any other prominent characteristic.
Arthur Conan Doyle
